2016 – VR, Sales Simulators and 330K Diplomas

Virtual Reality

We were among the first companies in the US to introduce VR courses. An employee puts the headset on, and finds himself in front of a customer in the conference room. The sense of presence is so strong that in a moment people forget where they are, start waving their arms around and talking aloud. You can see the demo video here.

Sales Simulators

It was a tough task to teach 500 sales reps out of 53 cities at Groupon. We didn’t use any online tools and most training had to be done individually. You could tell the reps something on Monday and they would forget it by Friday. It was a constant struggle.

If I could go back in time I would just use these Eduson simulators:

1. Speech recognition

Upload your scripts or use the universal ones we have prepared for you. A sales rep should repeat each phrase aloud until he (finally) remembers it by heart. The system does not let them go further until the pitch or script are word perfect. Sales reps obviously do not like it. But their executives just love it when the ad-libbing and gags stop.

2. Video Rehearsal Training

Record the chain of questions that sales reps typically hear (clients’ objections; or products’ features), then watch their recorded answers and assess them.

We have prepared the universal questions as well. What do you sell? Why is it so expensive? Let’s get back to it in October, etc.

If you do not like a sales rep’s answer, make him record it again! Athletes train, actors rehearse, and our John Doe should train as well before going to a meeting at Wells Fargo. Even if he himself doesn’t feel like it.

3. Best Practices

We have gathered hundreds of sales call recordings (with different voices and moods – an angry customer, a stubborn secretary and so on). Assess those calls, learn from mistakes of others and copy sales tricks you like.

Extensive Courses Catalogue

We have completely redesigned all our business cases. They imitate the working process (a Skype call, sending an email) and the decision-making process (What should one say at the meeting? Whom should one fire? How to plan a day?)

The new business cases now look like this:

They once used to confuse and frighten you:

We’re almost done redesigning the animated presentations. Guess why:

We have introduced dialogue simulators (branching dialogues with a sound track that imitate conversations with a client.

Charts

Companies’ admins can see all kinds of charts and graphs. They can slice and dice the data by any parameters, look at groups of employees or types of courses, follow the personnel assessment results and download the quarterly reports in one click.

Individual analytics was introduced as well. An employee can now see his rating, progress charts and how far ahead the peers are.

We’ve added benchmarks – a useful tool to compare oneself with other industry players. How do your employees rank compared to other FMCG or Banking companies?

Courses Description

The courses page has become more informative than ever. There is a list of skills that one will acquire once he or she has completed a course. Each course will have an engaging introductory video.

Clients, Marketing:

We’re proud of our new awesome clients: Mitsui, Pony Express, Leroy Merlin, MVideo, Gazprom, X5Retail and many others.

Their employees have watched 1,125,244 lectures, taken 656,514 business case tests, 1,195,908 video-course tests and have received 333,349 diplomas.

100 other useful changes:

the DISC test for sales reps; all courses can be now viewed on mobile phones and tablets; the notification center shows all reminders (yes, this bell in the top-right corner); if 3000 employees have not yet accepted an invitation, the manager can send them a reminder with one click; we have integrated with several popular LMSs and tried really hard to reply to your queries ASAP.

Quite impressive what a small enthusiastic team can achieve in a year. We’ll continue rocking next year.

Have a productive 2017!

Elena, CEO Eduson